Hollywood has found a new way to immortalize Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. According to Deadline, Kate McKinnon will star in The Dropout, a new limited series about the rise and fall of the Silicon Valley scammer.
Per the report, Hulu is closing a deal for The Dropout, a series based on the podcast of the same name. The show will be about how Holmes conned people into believing that her company had developed a diagnostic system that only required the smallest drop of blood. The lie made Holmes a billionaire — until the whole thing came crashing down around her.
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As Saturday Night Live’s master of impressions, McKinnon is the perfect choice for Holmes, whose deep voice and unique cadence has been mimicked by countless people on the internet. It also doesn’t hurt that McKinnon and Holmes share similar blonde hair and wide, bright blue eyes. It will be one of McKinnon’s first forays into drama: She will also appear in the upcoming film about the sexual harassment allegations against Roger Ailes.
Though Holmes’ lies came to a head in 2016, Holmes herself became a pop culture fascination recently. The HBO documentary The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley put a face to the woman who has also been the subject of the previously mentioned podcast and book Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by journalist John Carreyrou. Jennifer Lawrence is set to portray Holmes in an adaptation of Bad Blood.
This isn't the first time in recent history that Hulu has taken on a truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tale. The first season of anthology series The Act documents the story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard (Joey King), a young woman convicted of orchestrating the murder of her mother Dee Dee (Patricia Arquette), who suffered from Munchausen syndrome by proxy.